While Fox News was covering Kim Davis’ release from jail, anchor Shepard Smith interrupted to speak over the live footage, slamming Davis and her supporters:

Well they set this up as a religious play again. This is the same crowd that says ‘we don’t want Sharia law. Don’t let them come in here and start telling us what to do. Keep their religion out of our lives and out of our government.’ Well here we go again.

When this started, this lawyer said he needed an accommodation for a woman who wanted one. She said she didn’t want her name on a license — but — for gay people. They couldn’t come up with an accommodation. Now they’ve come up with one, they’ve let her out of jail, said ‘all right, you don’t have to have your name on there, just put the name of the county on there. All this is done.’ But it’s not what they want. You’re hearing now what they want.

This is what they want, and this is what they’re going to get. They’re gonna get a stirred-up argument and a couple of days of the news cycle and they’re gonna be able to make these claims — and the truth is when you get right down to the fundamentals of this, the Supreme Court of the United States says that you can’t have things being okay for one group of people and not okay for another group of people.

This is not unprecedented. They did it when they said that black and white people couldn’t marry. And they said oh, wait, I guess you can. And now they’ve said straight people and gay people can also all get married. You want to get married? Go right at it. The government’s not going to get in the way of you anymore than they did in the way of straight people back in the day.

But haters are going to hate. And we thought that what this woman wanted was an accommodation, which they’ve now granted her — something that worked for everybody, but it’s not what they want. This is what they want.

Fox News audience didn’t take kindly to Shepard’s stating the above opinion. The Right Scoop immediately called Smith a “puke:” “What a puke. Christians simply want for the government to stay out of our Christian beliefs instead of imprisoning us when our beliefs go against the invented rights of a lawless Supreme Court. And then he calls us hypocrites for not wanting Muslim theocracy in our country, suggesting we want to push our Christian values on the government? Does he know anything about how this country was founded? Has he ever read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence? What an idiot.”

Writing for GOPUSA, Cliff Kincaid called Shepard’s comments evidence of “anti-Christian bias that has been rearing its ugly head” on Fox News. He was surprised to see Fox “break its promise to air ‘fair and balanced’ coverage of the issue by permitting Smith to take such a crude stand against Davis.” He said Shepard doesn’t know the difference between Christianity and Islam. “Smith seems not to understand the difference between Christianity, a foundation of the American system that protects religious rights and liberty, and Islam, an authoritarian religion which wants to impose its values on others.”